It all felt very well win and overnight. But
actually, if you look back at history or indeed
, what he was just saying is he was looking
to buy Twitter. This kind of makes sense.
Yes, this is very much Elon Musk, essentially
putting himself in Twitter's brand, the brand. And
this idea of having kind of a super app goes
back to the late nineties when Elon Musk started the
company that would become paypal, you know, it's
the history is very interesting. Elon Musk actually merged
this company X dot com with paypal became CEO and
then was ousted after a very controversial effort to change
the name from paypal to X dot com. At
the time, a lot of employees felt like that
was a really insane decision just because paypal had a
really great brand. It was a verb, you
know, very much the way that Twitter was a
verb. And also when you're talking about finance,
right? Trust and so on is very important.
And I think the same issues could be at play
here. You know, on the other hand,
Elon Musk has managed to, you know, defy
the laws of business gravity. Many times. So
it's possible that this will look brilliant in retrospect.
Let's talk about whether it could look brilliant, Philip
from your perspective. Do you think Twitter? Now
, X could win back? Not only advertisers but
the consumer to have the trust that this could be
a payments player and a big one. Yes,
absolutely. I see so many people writing Twitter or
S obituaries right now saying that it's over and I
see the opposite. Right. I see Elon fulfilling
his long term dream of having a universal app,
a super app, whatever you want to call it
, that's going to do a variety of things.
He wants to change the way we pay people the
way that people get, get monetized for their content
. I see this as really the beginning of something
huge and, and there's no stopping Elon when he
really wants something Philip to your point. Of course
, with someone who is very much steeped in the
world of Web three right now. How much is
this having to adopt Web three or crypto or will
it be more of what we will associate paypal and
memo with? Yeah, I think Elon really wants
to adopt crypto and he wants to embrace the Web
three ideals, but I think that will be selling
it short. I think he needs to embrace both
. Uh you, you can live in a world
that's Web three and Web two to be able to
uh to handle payments et cetera. I mean,
he's making Twitter, it's essentially a universal name space
. Uh People want to know who I am.
I'm PBS identity. Um I don't necessarily get my
whole name. Um I get the, the,
the handle that I've chosen and from that point on
people can send me money directly to that. And
for me it's something that, that, uh that
bridges this gap between Web two and Web three max
. The history is so fascinating and the fact that
he ultimately was ousted because people felt that this was
a mad move and brand destruction. How much are
you reading and feeling that ultimately, we are destroying
something with Twitter with tweets with the bird or not
, that actually people want to be involved in the
brand of Elon. Yes, I mean, I
think if you look at Elon Musk's history and you
look for weaknesses, you know, obviously he has
a lot of strength as Phil was just saying,
but the weakness I think is ego, right?
And you've seen it, get him, get him
into trouble before when he sort of stepped in it
on Twitter. And you know, this is a
case where you're taking a very well known very successful
media brand and, and taking it apart. And
I mean, the verb thing does strike me as
a challenge. I mean, it's hard to know
Elon yesterday on Twitter said that they're called Xes now
, which is kind of hard to say And so
I think it's going to be a challenge and of
course, there is, you know, this kind
of very far out vision of payments and so on
. But number one question is, do you trust
Twitter, which is run by a guy who,
you know, spends a lot of his day and
it's not run by a guy or is it,
I mean, to that point, can Linda steer
us Max? That's a very good question, right
? I mean, and she has come out sort
of embracing this and very much has Elon's back.
I just think the question is, you know,
why buy this company for$44 billion? If you
were going to take away the brand, the brand
seems like it was part of the value here.
Of course, Elon Musk has a very valuable brand
as well. So I suppose we'll see. Of
course, lastly, Philip Apple App Store, you
help build the review operations team, we help build
in and of itself. I'm looking at the App
store and this bluebirds still there and it's still called
Twitter. How quickly can you sync this thing up
from an app perspective? He could have, he
could have done a sync immediately, right? It's
it's not, it's it's pretty trivial for them to
be able to submit the changes, get the,
get the logo updated and then have the app,
the app updated in a matter of hours. So
why that's taking a longer time makes me wonder if
there's some additional features that, that he hasn't announced
that are going to go with it as well.
Otherwise it should have been through already.